The worldwide web is a continually growing, large repository of information such as online news articles. Online news articles are a useful source of worldwide information and events. The number of online news articles available on the web is growing at a rapid pace in terms of the number of web sites providing online news articles and in terms of the number of articles provided per site. An estimate for online news sources such as magazines and newspapers on the web is over 10,000. Worldwide, online news sources comprise local news sources, regional news sources, and national news sources. These news sources cater to different topics such as world news, national news, local news, business news, technical news, sports news, etc.
News sources comprise print media that also have an online presence. These news sources publish news articles daily, monthly, and sometimes also make older articles available for archival access. News sources comprise non-print media sites that provide news articles only via the web.
Given this large number of news articles appearing daily, it is becoming increasingly useful to have automated techniques and systems that can extract meaningful information from these news articles and make the extracted information available for users. Such extracted information can simplify navigation and search tasks. These automated systems (e.g., search engines) typically crawl the web periodically, pulling web pages and analyzing the contents of the web pages.
A useful task for any such system is to be able to extract by-line for each news article. A by-line is a line occurring at the beginning of an article or story typically comprising author, date, source, location, etc. By-line information is useful both for basic search and navigation among news articles. By-line information is also useful in trending analysis on the content of the articles. Queries of the form                Show news articles written by author X,        Show news articles written by author X about a keyword Y,        Show news articles written by author X on date D, or        Show news articles on date D about a keyword Y comprise basic methods to search and navigate the large repository of news articles. Queries on by-line information require knowledge of the date and author of an article on the crawled web page. Furthermore, any kind of time-trending analysis on a topic requires knowledge of the date of creation for each news article on that topic.        
In regular print newspapers or when visually inspected by a human, the by-line information is easily visible in the small lines that appear below or above an article headline. These small lines list the author of the article along with the date and possibly a source or place. However, finding the by-line information automatically from an html source of a web page is difficult because location of the by-line is unknown. The by-line is not explicitly mentioned or labeled. Furthermore, the crawled web pages have other items and templates around the core article. There can be other dates and person names before and after the by-line. Selecting any date or name based on location typically does not provide the desired by-line information for the article under consideration. Furthermore, different websites use different patterns for presenting by-line information and the patterns may vary over time.
One conventional approach uses a “last modified date” provided by some websites in the http header to denote the date when the page was last modified. However, web pages often comprise dynamic content such as advertisements or other templates. Consequently, the last modified date corresponds to advertisements or other templates rather than the original date of the core news article. Consequently, the “last modified date” can be unreliable for most sites.
Another conventional approach uses feeds such as a rich site summary (RSS) feed or a resource description framework (RDF) feed (referenced as feeds). Feeds often comprise the desired by-line information. However, not all news sites provide a feed; information provided in a feed is at the discretion of the content provider and some providers do not provide by-line information. Even when provided, the feeds are not free or are not available for commercial use by web page analysis systems. Furthermore, feeds may be available only for current articles and not for older archived articles. Consequently, crawling web pages is desired to include older articles in an analysis.
Yet another conventional approach looks for keyword patterns such as “By: *” or “Composed by: *” to identify an author. A keyword pattern such as “Published On: *” or “Submitted On: *” is used to identify date. This approach works well for some sites but is limited because keyword patterns change from site to site. Furthermore, no keyword exists before author/date for many sites. For example, a by-line may comprise only “John Cramer on Apr. 4, 2005”.
What is therefore needed is a system, a computer program product, and an associated method for automatically extracting by-line information. The need for such a solution has heretofore remained unsatisfied.